REACT25 - RIZOM Joins the Conversation at the Frontier of CultTech

This October, Vienna will host a landmark gathering at the intersection of culture and technology: REACT 2025 (Research and Educational Advancements in Culture and Technology), organised by the CultTech Association and taking place just before the CultTech Summit.

As the first edition of REACT, the event seeks to connect scholarship, design, and experimentation in order to explore how culture, creativity, and technology evolve together. In that spirit, RIZOM will take part with both its CEO and CTO serving as panelists and roundtable contributors, helping anchor a conversation on symbolic systems, ritual, and meaning in the age of AI.

CultTech, REACT, and the Culture-Tech Ecosystem

“CultTech” (culture + technology) provides a framework for using technology as a site of cultural imagination, symbolic agency, and societal relevance.The CultTech Association, based in Vienna, supports this perspective by nurturing cultural startups, residencies, education programmes, and ventures that place culture at the centre of human and technological progress.

Within this ecosystem, REACT serves as the academic and reflective counterpart to the more public-facing CultTech Summit. Its panels, roundtables, and research contributions explore the connections between creative production, cultural meaning, and technological materiality.

RIZOM’s presence expresses a clear commitment to helping shape the language, norms, and conceptual foundations of this emerging field.

RIZOM on the Stage: Symbolic Systems, Ritual, and Design

Two RIZOM co-founders, Marianne Magnin (CEO) and Abol Froushan (CTO), have been invited to take part in REACT 2025:

• Panel (20 October, 16:10): Symbolic Systems, Ritual Technologies, and Emotional Resonance: Designing for Meaning in the Age of AI, with Prof. Cristine Legare, Marco Cappellini, and Aik Yang Ng.

• Roundtable (21 October, 15:30): Ritual, Story, and Empirical Foundations for Symbolic Technologies, with Prof. Cristine Legare, Prof. Vincenzo Russo, and Marco Cappellini.

Marianne Magnin will also represent The Cornelius Arts Foundation (TCAF), the UK R&D charity she founded and chairs. Its field experiments on the emotional impact of art inspired the creation of RIZOM as an operating system for symbolic intelligence.

Across these sessions, RIZOM will contribute both conceptual framing (through the panel) and cross-disciplinary dialogue (through the roundtable). The discussions will address key questions such as:

• How can symbolic systems such as metaphor, mood architecture, and ritual structure support AI-mediated creativity without reducing meaning to utility, and vice-versa?

• What empirical foundations (cognitive, developmental, and cross-cultural) can strengthen the design of symbolic and ritual technologies?

• In designing for emotional resonance, how can openness and diversity coexist with coherence and ethical awareness?

• How can digital tools evolve from amplifiers of individual creativity into participants in shared symbolic environments?

The Wider Conversation: Other Panelists and Perspectives

RIZOM will share the stage with a remarkable group of thinkers and practitioners, including:

• Prof. Cristine Legare, founder and director of the Center for Applied Cognitive Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and developmental and cultural psychologist whose research on ritual, imitation, and belief provides empirical grounding for symbolic design.

• Prof. Vincenzo Russo, Professor of Consumer Psychology and Neuromarketing at IULM University in Milan, and Scientific Director of the Behaviour and Brain Lab IULM Neuromarketing Research Centre, using EEG, eye-tracking, and physiological analysis to examine symbolic and emotional experience.

• Marco Cappellini, CEO of ArtCentrica, exploring digital heritage and immersive narrative environments. RIZOM and ArtCentrica are currently partnering to connect symbolic intelligence and immersive heritage.

• Aik Yang Ng, CEO of HoloTracker, which enables schools to show evidence of deep skills and character growth by capturing, analysing and communicating observational data.

• Luiza Guerreiro (in absentia), co-founder of Truth and Tales, working at the intersection of storytelling, pedagogy, and emotional development.

Together, these contributors bring a diverse blend of empirical, cognitive, symbolic, and design-driven perspectives.

Full two-day programme here

What We Will Discuss at REACT 2025: The Next Challenges for CultTech

RIZOM will explore how symbolic systems can deepen creative technology, moving from data extraction to meaning coherence.Each challenge connects directly to the frameworks described in Symbolic Infrastructure in CultTech: Ritual, Topology, and the Measurement of Meaning.

1. Plurality of Meaning and Algorithmic Consistency

How can systems let meaning emerge freely while staying coherent? RIZOM’s Symbolic Coherence Index (SCI) models alignment without standardisation and enforcement, i.e. coherence through resonance.

2. Cross-Cultural and Developmental Validity

Rituals differ, yet their topology repeats. Fieldwork from our Collegalli Convergence experiment and research by Prof. Cristine Legare show that symbolic design can remain universal in form while culturally specific in expression.

3. Emotional Resonance as a Design Axis

Resonance is structure. The Recursive Engagement Score (RES) captures how reflection deepens over time, turning emotion into understanding across art, education, care and beyond.

4. Ethics of Symbolic Mediation

When technology shapes meaning, it must do so transparently. Interpretive Collapse Risk (ICR) highlights when symbolic load exceeds coherence, highlighting when reflection risks turning into distortion.

5. Bridging Research and Practice

The Collegalli Convergence shows how symbolic instrumentation links cognitive science, art, and field practice. Empirical and symbolic research can now converge within CultTech’s shared architecture of meaning.

Together, these challenges signal the next phase for CultTech: 

• from data to meaning

• from analytics to interpretation

• from design thinking to ritual architecture.

Why Symbolic Intelligence Matters Now

AI and algorithmic systems are rapidly changing how creative content is produced, mediated, and experienced. Without deliberate attention to symbolic depth, cultural meaning, and ritual structure, creativity risks losing its human grounding.

REACT and the wider CultTech movement aim to restore this balance by placing meaning, culture, and emotional resonance at the centre of technological progress.

For RIZOM, this participation reflects an ongoing effort to shape the conceptual frameworks, ethics, language and real-world tools (what we call Symbolic OS) guiding the next generation of creative technologies, to act as relational co-creators of culture and meaning. The ambition is to ensure that emerging systems support expression, coherence, and genuine cultural agency at both individual and collective levels.

We invite colleagues, researchers, technologists, and creatives to join us in Vienna and to continue the dialogue beyond the panels.